Pantheon has held the final close of Pantheon Secondary Opportunities Fund (PSOF), a new program that will exclusively invest in the rapidly evolving market for GP-initiated private equity secondary solutions, with total investor commitments of $624 million, exceeding the initial target.
Pantheon has played a market role in structuring and investing GP capital solutions, deploying a total of USD3.6 billion to 37 of these highly specialised transactions since 2010. The new program will invest across the full range of GP deals, which are often complex transactions that carry larger ticket sizes, with a significant representation of single company secondaries.
The GP solutions market has grown in recent years and accounted for almost half of total secondary transaction volume in 2020, with expectations that it could do so again in 2021. Some analysts forecast the segment reaching USD50 billion globally this year. Pantheon believes that single asset secondaries are a particularly compelling opportunity, providing investors with the opportunity to invest alongside high-quality fund managers into select assets that have been identified as having the potential for future upside realisation through the extension of holding periods.
PSOF has already generated strong momentum, committing to 11 transactions since an initial close held earlier this year, with a total value of approximately USD200 million. All deals leveraged Pantheon’s deep asset-level underwriting expertise, and were completed alongside other Pantheon private equity secondaries vehicles and established fund managers that we know well.
“We’re pleased to have closed PSOF and look forward to putting capital to work on behalf of our clients in what we believe is an extremely dynamic market,” says Paul Ward, Managing Partner.
“As general partners increasingly access the GP-led market to solve for a fundamental limitation of the private equity fund model, which typically provides a finite period to which to grow and realise investments, we expect this market to continue to expand and evolve. This is presenting compelling opportunities for us to invest alongside high quality and established fund managers in some of their coveted private equity assets.”
